Our Bodies, Ourselves: Figuration Features in "Mirror of the Mind" at El Espacio 23

What kind of art do we need in 2024?

For years, art has seemingly swung between two distinct poles of abstraction and figuration. After the modernists forever shifted ideas about how to depict human forms and objects, the artists of the midcentury went even further, creating works that emphasized color and geometric shapes. When they went too far, movements such as pop art, conceptual art, and neo-expressionism brought back the figure. In the last 20 years, complaints of zombie formalism as well as zombie figuration, art that resuscitates either tendency without the ethos that animated the original movements, have filled the art world. It's this dichotomy that El Espacio 23, the private museum owned by billionaire real estate mogul Jorge Pérez, has decided to explore this year with the exhibition "Mirror of the Mind: Figuration in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection."

"Last year, we focused on abstraction and textile-based work, and we thought, how do we tell a different story from the collection? And so we decided to go the opposite way," says Patricia Hanna, director of El Espacio 23. "We decided to focus just on figuration. And there was something about, in a world in which we're living where there's such pervasive use of technology, artificial intelligence, we felt like it was a moment where everyone's longing for something, longing to belong. What unites us is being human, right? So we kind of wanted to explore those themes in the exhibition."

With artworks from 120 artists in various mediums, "Mirror of the Mind" approaches a very broad theme by splitting the 150 works into six themes. It's not just the human figure the curators are concerned with but with the idea of the self. Sections for "Belonging" and "Redemption" analyze our need for community and empowerment, while "Introspection" and "Perception" discuss ideas around our sense of self and how we contextualize it within what came before.
A few locals are featured in the show, including Jared McGriff, Tomás Essón, Didier William, and Reginald O'Neal. O'Neal's monumental sculpture The Cellist, first shown at last year's Art Basel Miami Beach, is given its own room. Broadly, however, "Mirror of the Mind" is yet another showcase of the breadth and scale of the collection, all of which will eventually be donated to the Pérez Art Museum Miami. An enviable group of African and Black diasporic photographers, from Dawoud Bey, Carrie Mae Weems, Rashid Johnson, and Malick Sidibé, are included. There's a rare sculpture by Giorgio de Chirico showing a pair of seated figures, and another by Anthony Caro shows a woman entering a bath. There's a particular focus on artists from throughout the Global South, including countries such as Argentina, Cuba, Botswana, Bolivia, South Africa, and Brazil.

Political and world affairs find expression in the "Perception" section. Spanish artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo's sculpture Tank Man depicts the iconic figure from the Tiananmen Square protests. One wouldn't know it just by looking at him, as he seems like an ordinary man carrying shopping bags at first glance. Other artists consider world leaders, from Yoshua Okon's Chille, a mock funeral procession for Pinochet, or Larry Rivers' update of Jacques-Louis David's famous Napoleon portrait, retitled The Second Greatest Homosexual.
"Trauma," another section, features work that digs into the ways people and artists respond to harm inflicted on themselves or historically. There are two works by Anselm Kiefer, known for his bleak appraisals of Germany's complicity in the Holocaust. Iranian artist Shirin Neshat takes on her government's treatment of women in a video installation entitled The Fury. Striking images in this section include Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies' painting of a skull and a photograph by Ethiopian Aïda Muluneh showing an African woman in whiteface, hands painted red.

Finally, the museum's second-floor loft is given over to the most provocative section, "Flesh," focusing on the human body. Although not the main focus, eroticism is a theme explored here — albeit not quite as explicitly as the newly opened Museum of Sex down the street. There's a lovely pastel-colored self-portrait by Marta Minujin of her backside, lying horizontally. Then, there are some less subtle works. A Gilbert & George photo collage titled Blood and Piss centers on the middle-aged pair standing nude and conjoined. A Richard Prince appropriation artwork titled United States places a replica of a pornographic paperback's cover, showing a menage à trois next to the book itself. From an abstract De Kooning painting to a drawing by Robert Colescott of a plump woman, all sorts of bodies have their appeal here.

Maybe that's the kind of art we need in 2024, figurative or otherwise: diverse, empathetic, and provocative all at once.

"Mirror of the Mind: Figuration in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection." On view through August 16, 2025, at El Espacio 23, 2270 NW 23rd St., Miami; elespacio23.org. Admission is free.